Page 34 of Run for Her Life
A thought occurred to Zoe. “Dawn is very concerned about competition. What if that’s what this is? Some corporate spy? Only a competitor would benefit from this theft.”
“Who enjoyed killing a little too much.” Aiden completed her train of thought.
Zoe’s mind raced with question after question. She didn’t want to admit it out loud but the biggest question still remained—what washerconnection to all this? She imagined a dark, shadowy figure always following her around, blinking in and out of existence. Her phone chirped with a notification.
“It’s an email from the crime lab.” Zoe opened it. “They were comparing the DNA from the lock of hair in the mail to Jackie since it didn’t match Annabelle.” Blankness spread through her synapses. “It doesn’t match Jackie either.”
“What?” Aiden closed the distance between them, looking at her phone over her shoulder.
“Enough nuclear DNA was preserved to determine it is male DNA. It wasn’t a match but there was an overlap.”
“They are related.”
Zoe skimmed the long report. “Around fifty percent match…” She scrolled down to the summary. “Mitochondrial DNA was identical, which means?—”
“Siblings.”
“There’s more.” She waded through the tide of information. “They did keratin degradation analysis and amino acid racemization testing to get a rough timeline of decomposition. It’s around thirty years old.”
“That old?” Aiden sounded skeptical. “Wouldn’t it have degraded? The hair you got looked fresh enough.”
“Hair is one of the most durable tissues. Far more so than skin and other organs. It’s possible for it to be just fine if the body was embalmed or placed in a sealed coffin.” Something clicked inside Zoe. “The fire was thirty years ago.”
The revelation simmered between them.
She spoke through the knot in her stomach. “Jackie’s brother, Michael Fink, died in the fire. The killer sent me his hair. But why? And how did he have access to his hair?”
TWENTY-ONE
The first time Zoe had stepped foot in a cemetery was when Rachel was buried.
She still remembered that day. The pain had been so monumental and consuming that she had almost fainted. She’d had no appetite for days. But she couldn’t marinate in that grief for long.
Mist was trapped on top of the thick trees. Their branches so crooked and lush with leaves that the mist simply hung there, blocking the sunlight and cooling the ground.
Zoe buttoned up her leather jacket, a chilly breeze slapping her face as she trudged, avoiding the patches of puddle from the rain earlier. The headstones appeared, like white dots popping out of a brown ground. Most of them were worn and leaning with time. Weathered and chipped. Others were sharp and shiny.
“There it is!” Aiden pointed to a faded headstone, tucked away in a corner under a wild weeping willow, its branches sweeping the ground.
The inscription on the headstone read:
in loving memory of michael fink 1980–1995. briefly here, eternally loved.
A thick silence crystallized between them; their eyes fixed on the words. Zoe’s heart squeezed. A single crow called out in the distance, the sound cutting through the hush like a broken bell.
“How did Lisa know where he was buried?” Zoe asked Aiden.
“The entire town knows where the kids from that fire are buried. She told me how in the first few years strangers would leave flowers…” His voice trailed off at the barren headstone. “I guess no one cares anymore.”
Zoe studied his angular face, pinched in tension. She was used to Aiden behaving like a chess player—always strategizing and carefully plotting his words with a glimmer of something raw here and there. But right now, he was almost shaking, his foot incessantly tapping, his hands fidgeting in the pockets.
Was it being in a cemetery or the grave of a child?
“The soil doesn’t look disturbed,” she noted, analyzing the ground, which looked even. “Unless someone is really good at this. It’s the only cemetery in town. Would the killer risk doing something like this? Break open a coffin, cut a lock of hair, and bury the body again? It seems very convoluted,”
He frowned. “Well, he’s sending you riddles and hunting down women.” He looked around, his eye catching a middle-aged man hunched a few feet away between two headstones with a damp cloth and shears, wiping away moss.
“Excuse me,” Aiden said. “You work here?”
